In the past, artistic illustrations have been solely created by skilled artists and creative individuals willing to devote considerable time and resources to the creation of such artistic illustrations. Current developments in a computer technology now enables a relatively quick and easy creation of photo realistic images. Accordingly, it is possible to automate details of photo realistic rendering. Such rendering processes are generally controlled by a human user selecting scenes and rendering parameters.
However, conventional processes and systems do not produce very good non-photo realistic works (i.e., paintings and drawings) having a hand-painted appearance in a fully automated manner. In particular, the human user utilizing these conventional processes and systems must interactively "paint" the entire image using a paint program or process an image or 3D model through a narrowly-defined set of non-photo realistic filters.
Some conventional methods and systems for processing an image do not produce images having non-photo realistic aspects. For example, these conventional processes and systems use very simple brush strokes, all of which have equal sizes and shapes. In contrast to hand-drawn paintings, the resulting images produced by these conventional processes and systems have mechanical and computer-generated appearance.
Thus, there is a need to overcome these disadvantages and provide a method and a system which produce non-photo realistic images without having the disadvantageous mechanical aspects.